Sometimes, I don’t know when to stop.
There are days when I feel I’m the poster boy for the way the Internet shouldn’t work, a never-ending series of forks that move me further and further away from that thing I’m supposed to be doing and toward new, shiny things I didn’t know existed.
Unfortunately, that’s the opposite of the problem I usually have. If my brakes have given out when I’m on the Internet, hurtling me closer to the cliff’s edge of never getting anything ever done again, in real life I spend most of my time with my parking brake stuck on.
I’m the first person to choose staying home over going out, getting back early over staying up late, and (much to the ongoing madness of pye) finding something on TV rather than renting a movie.
If there’s an easier, less expensive, less exciting path that’s where I want to be.
I’m planning on working on that in 2013.
2012 was a great year for discovering projects that inspire the hell out of me and all of those projects share an unwillingness to even admit that an easier path exists.
My good friend (and former roommate) Ronald Short premiered Billi and Theodore, his first feature, at the Indianapolis Film Festival this year. Having seen the process from a semi-close distance from start to finish, take my word for it: there’s nothing not scary about any of that.
This year danee and I met Dirk Walker. Dirk’s approach to his podcast, Inside Joke with Dirk Walker, is so energetic and optimistic that there are times my brain can’t process where he’s coming from… which is an awesome place to find yourself, asking what’s actually possible and (maybe more importantly) why your first instinct is to think that something can’t be done.
And then, of course, there’s Chris Gethard and The Chris Gethard Show, probably the one thing I discovered this year that most made me want to change the way I go about everything. I’ve written a ton about TCGS before, but I want to bring it up again, really just to have an excuse to include this quote, from Geth’s last blog about the state of the show and where it’s moving in the next year:
We are going to be soldiers working for the platform that allows us the opportunity to attain those heights. We will live and die for that platform, whatever it is. A network. An online distributor. Whatever it is, if there’s one thing the TCGS architects have proven, it’s that we’re united and loyal and we go to bat for our own. And honestly? Everyone who passed on the chance to put us in front of more viewers, the people who rolled their eyes at or got scared of what we’re building here, who felt like it was too chaotic, not safe enough for them, who didn’t see why it was funny or unique – those people better just get out of the fucking way.
Gethard and the whole TCGS crew isn’t just convinced that the harder path is the path that you should be on, they’re aggressive about the fact that this is the only real path that exists. The things they build will be awesome and will be their own, not in spite of the fact that it took a long time and was a ton of hard work and no one thought they could do it… but because of those things.
So, this is the part where I could announce my Next Big Project, and I could say I’m setting out to do all these Really Big Things, like the people I just mentioned, and honestly, that’s usually what I’d be writing here.
That’s not how I want to start off 2013. The big projects are going to come and go, some of them with more fanfare and enthusiasm than others. As I’m typing this, with my nephew playing with his new basketball and his new The Good Ones shirt and watching Peter Pan for the zillionth time and bringing just as much enthusiasm to each of those things as he does pretty much everything else, the goal for 2013 is just to mirror that enthusiasm as much as possible, to say yes to more things, to say no only to the things that really, really deserve it, and to be able to look back on 2013 and say most of my mistakes came from saying yes, rather than opting out.
2011 was the year I said yes to danee pye and Texas.
2012 was the year I said yes to Fort Wayne.
2013, hopefully, is the year I say yes to a whole boatload of stuff.